Researchers cut the required bandwidth for graphics-intensive game streaming

The researchers claim that this collaborative rendering technique requires just one-sixth as much bandwidth as conventional cloud gaming setups for the same visual quality. The mobile or console device sketches out the key parts of each frame or the bulk of the image in a subset of the 60 frames displayed per second (at least six frames must be generated client side to be worthwhile), while the remote server does the heavy lifting and fills on all of the fine-grained details such as shadows, real-time lighting, and subtle changes in texture.

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Kahawai was prototyped and integrated with open-source commercial gaming engine idTech 4, which powers games such as Doom 3 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The researchers trialled it on 50 hardcore gamers playing Doom 3, with results that suggest no disadvantage for users of Kahawai versus a standard thin-client (i.e., server offloaded) streaming system. You can see a comparison of the performance and graphics in different scenarios in the video below.

Kahawai was also found to work offline, sans remote server connections, at lower graphical fidelity, which is great news for people on unstable networks (because play could continue uninterrupted) and for people with slow internet connections.

Kahawai may have applications beyond gaming, too. "Games are a natural place to start understanding how collaborative rendering can work," said study co-author and Duke computer scientist Landon Cox. "But any graphics-intensive application could potentially benefit from Kahawai, from 3-D medical imaging to computer-aided design software used by architects and engineers."